


At War.

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 09:32:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson doesn't miss the war. There's always something...</p>
            </blockquote>





	At War.

John Watson does not miss the war.

Mycroft Holmes dictates from his chair in his plush office. He makes the phone calls; he reads the statistics and weighs the pros against the cons. Money lost? Manpower lost? The end result will even out the scores. He’ll settle in his three-piece suits and rich chairs with his celebratory whiskey and his smugness.

Human worth?

Mycroft Holmes will not understand. John Watson will not expect him to.

They say honor and duty and it’s all  _just that_  until there is blood’s dripping from a child’s chin. Not his own, no – his mothers. He can’t stop the screaming, you can’t stop the bleeding and there is no stopping the endless scream in your tired silence. Two children stand nearby, clothes torn and face streaked with dirt, shell-shocked and confused. A bomb goes off somewhere, the colossal explosion deafening. No one starts. No one looks around as a new pile of rubble announces itself.

You stumble off with three babies that will never recover, one dead body left behind and the weight of someone you should have saved never quite left behind.

It’s a crippling weight to shoulder.

Time doesn’t ease your horror, but you learn to accept the horror like you learn to accept the grit in your eyes and the permanent dryness in your throat. Time doesn’t thicken your skin. Time is no anesthetic, and you are in dire need of them because there is never enough anesthesia at war; only pained whimpers of wounds that fester and the agonized yells of non-anesthetized amputations .  

Sometimes he wakes up in cold sweat to dreams of just those agonized yells. Only the yells.

Other times he jerks up to dreams of a comrade, face leering in a way it wasn’t then, torso trailing into a bloody mess of missing skin and missing legs. The smell of death clings to his nostrils, seeps past the sweat and into his pores. They’d shared jokes and water in the shade of a tank not ten minutes ago. His brain fights the information, his intestines fight to writhe its way out of his skin and he vomits aggressively besides the severed body and stumbles away, armed, ironically in a way that should have been hysterical, with a rifle and a first aid kit.

He remembers it later with vicious vividness and he wants nothing more than to carve it out of his brain and fling it into the Thames. He squashes the thought; it would be disrespectful not to remember.

There’s nothing romantic about the war. Blood isn’t beautiful against the sand, slaughtered innocence from death and rape is the furthest thing from justice and a self righteous breach into a territory that doesn’t fucking matter anyway because everything boils down to people just like himself trying to survive in a world already entirely too cruel and in the end and there is _nothing_  else to it. There are lives that could have been and lead and they percolate the earth and rot at war, without meaning. There is fatigue at war. There is pain. There is guilt.

There’s nothing romantic about the wide-eyed and terrified civilian he’s tending to. There is no honor in the bullet that pierces his skin in an excruciating flare of pain. There is no duty in bleeding onto his patient, convulsing and shuddering, while his patient, convulsing and shuddering as well through a shared litany of ‘oh God, please let me live’, bleeds dry onto the drier ground.

John Watson does not miss the war. He doesn’t need the thrill. He’s seen far too much. Enough for a life time.

But he’s saved those he can today, and will do it again tomorrow and it almost, almost makes up for all those that he couldn’t.

John Watson will sleep fine tonight.


End file.
